Chocolate and Pistachio Biscotti

I’m on a bit of a pistachio fling at the moment, throwing them in everything. I just adore their sweet jade loveliness. I whipped up a quick, and small batch of these biscotti over the weekend. It was purely an exercise to use up ingredients but as I don’t have any biscotti here on the blog I photographed the bake to share it with you. These hard cookies are perfect to dip in a steaming cup of coffee, they are easy to make and it’s always nice to go a little {non-authentically} Italian every now and again.

You could certainly switch the pistachios with hazelnuts, the recipe is very adaptable. It is based loosely on Paul Hollywood’s biscotti recipe, I’ve played around with the ingredients and reduced the quantities for a small batch. To make my biscotti super-portable I made stubby, short cookies but you could make longer, more elegant ones by cutting the biscotti on the diagonal. What I love about baking biscotti is that you don’t need any special equipment and they store for ages in an airtight container.

Chocolate and Pistachio Biscotti

makes a small batch of around 10 biscotti

oven 160 C / gas 3 / 325 F No Fan {although I did use a fan for this batch as the oven only had a fan option, and they turned out fine}

large baking sheet lined with parchment

100 g { 4/5 cup} plain flour

1/4 tsp baking powder

90 g { 2/5 cup} caster sugar

1 free-range egg

20 g { 1 ounce} dark chocolate, melted and cooled

40 g { 1/4 cup} pistachio nuts, shelled and roughly chopped

20 g { 1 ounce} dark chocolate, chopped or chocolate chips

Sift the flour and bakingpowder into a mixing bowl and stir in the caster sugar. Beat the egg and add it. Begin to bring the mixture together and add the melted chocolate. It will become a soft dough.

Smoosh in the chopped pistachio nuts and the chocolate chunks/chips.

Lightly knead the dough to fully combine the ingredients then form it into a fairly fat log. Place on the baking sheet and bake for 25 minutes.

After 25 minutes, slide the parchment with the baked log onto a cooling rack and leave to cool and firm up for about 10 minutes.

Slice the log into 2 cm thick slices with a sharp knife. If you cut on the diagonal you will have longer biscotti.

Place the biscotti slices onto the baking sheet prepared with a fresh sheet of parchment.

Bake for 10 – 15 minutes, flip them over and bake for a further 10 minutes.